U.S. Entangled in Mystery of Georgia's Islamic Fighters

By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: June 15, 2003

PANKISI GORGE, Georgia, June 11—
For months, local residents say, the group of 15 Arab and Central Asian fighters lived quietly in a two-story house here, among the hundreds of guerrillas who had turned this wooded vale near the Russian border into a burgeoning center of Islamic militancy.

Like many of those who gathered here, the fighters had come over the snowy passes from Chechnya, where they had been helping their fellow Muslims in their struggle to break with the Russian republic. They exercised to stay in shape and went into the woods to practice shooting. Some of the militants departed, presumably for Russia, while new ones came to prepare for the fight.

Then, one night last fall, according to local residents, the group of Arabs and Central Asians packed up and left. Over the next several months, villagers and Georgian officials said, hundreds of other fighters followed, never to return.

''One morning, I got up, and they were gone,'' said Valodya Tskhovrebov, a farmer who lived near the Arab fighters. ''They were nice guys. They didn't drink or smoke.''

The departure of the Islamic fighters from this gorge in the Caucasus Mountains appears to represent an uncertain victory for the Bush administration, which last year asserted that the area had become a center of activity by Al Qaeda. To help Georgia confront the threat, the administration dispatched a team of Green Berets last year to provide military training to the country's troops.

Since last August, when Georgian forces began an operation to clear the gorge, senior Georgian leaders and Western diplomats here say the number of guerrillas in the gorge has dropped to fewer than 50 from about 700. The passage of militants across the mountains into Chechnya has largely ceased for the moment, according to Western diplomats and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has dispatched observers to watch the border.

Georgian officials say they detained more than 30 militants from the gorge, most of them Arabs or Chechens. They were deported, the officials said, to countries ranging from Russia to France and Japan, where officials say they detained a Japanese citizen helping the guerrillas.

A senior Georgian official said his government had also turned over 13 Arab fighters to the United States government last fall. The Arabs had been found in the gorge and were suspected of being involved in the Chechen campaign. It is unclear what the Americans did with them.

''We just handed them over,'' the Georgian official said.

Officials at the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, declined to comment on the reported deportations. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration has taken into custody hundreds of foreign citizens suspected of terrorism and held them without charges or access to legal representation. The administration has refused to release the names of those arrested, considering them enemy combatants.

What happened to the hundreds of other fighters who left the Pankisi Gorge remains a mystery that casts doubt on the ultimate success of the operation to sweep the area of Islamic militants. Villagers said that most of the fighters were Chechen, and that once it became clear they were no longer welcome in Georgia, they headed back toward Russia. Some of the fighters, they said, were killed by Russian soldiers as they crossed the mountains.

Indeed, the American-backed effort to clear the gorge of terrorists appears to have become a de facto campaign against the Chechen nationalist movement as well, thereby entangling the United States in the region's politics to a greater extent than before. By most accounts here, the overwhelming majority of the fighters in the gorge were Chechens, and while they were intensely religious, they were dedicated to striking at Russian, not Western, targets.

For months, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had threatened to send his country's forces into Georgia against the Chechen rebels he said were taking shelter in the Pankisi Gorge. Georgian officials, fearing a Russian attack, turned to the United States for help last year.

Georgian officials say Mr. Putin was furious over their decision to invite American military trainers into a country that he regards as falling within Russia's sphere of influence. But for now, the threat of invasion seems to have ebbed.

Yet while the operation appears to have succeeded in apprehending several individuals with possible links to Al Qaeda, it also appears to have killed many Chechen guerrillas, and thereby to have embittered Chechens who looked to the United States for sympathy in what they considered a legitimate revolt against a repressive government.

One Chechen refugee, Acima Imadiova, who lives in a dilapidated community center in the gorge, approached an American visitor, wearing a bitter smile. ''Tell Mr. Bush to stop the war in Chechnya,'' she said. ''Ask him why he is paddling in the same boat with Putin.''

The first Chechen guerrillas began arriving here in 1999, as the second Chechen war got under way. The gorge, a lush river valley about 25 miles from the Russian border, was already home to several thousand ethnic Chechens known as the Kist, whose ancestors had migrated to predominantly Christian Georgia a century ago.